1.15.2008

NOT content with admiring Europe from afar, the Arab emirate of Dubai is to build a replica of Lyons under a £350m deal signed with the French city last week.

The French like to talk of their “civilising mission” abroad, but duplicating Lyons’s main cultural, gastronomic and sporting institutions in the middle of the desert was not their idea: it is the obsession of Saeed al-Gandhi, a Dubai businessman.